The water-jet has been used primarily as a cutting tool for non-contact cutting of many soft materials that cannot be advantageously cut by sawing techniques. The process uses one or more pumps that pressurize water to a high pressure, typically about 50,000-60,000 PSI, and pass the water through a small orifice, on the order of 0.002-to-0.020 inch diameter, in a nozzle to produce a high velocity water-jet. In the 1980s, the water-jet was improved by the introduction of abrasive fluid-jet cutting, wherein abrasive particles such as garnet are inducted into a mixing chamber and accelerated by the water-jet as they pass through a mixing tube. The addition of abrasive particles greatly improved the cutting speed and range of materials amenable to fluid-jet cutting.
Qualities of machining by abrasive fluid-jet, traditionally, have limited the use of the abrasive fluid-jet strictly to through-cutting, where the cutting jet passes all the way through the workpiece similar to a bandsaw. A cut produced by a jet, such as an abrasive fluid-jet, has characteristics that differ from cuts produced by more traditional machining processes. Unlike a hard cutter tool such as an end mill, the removal of material by abrading with the high-pressure fluid-jet has been very difficult to predict or control to the point where a desired finite depth pocket pattern could be obtained, and repeatable results were not achievable. Additionally, there has been little ability to achieve varied depth and shape of the pocket resulting from the abrading in order to meet engineering requirements of the workpiece. These operating characteristics have caused many to limit the use of the abrasive fluid-jet to applications to through-cutting. In through-cutting, the abrasive fluid-jet may simply be applied for a duration sufficient to breach the material and thus the control of the shape or depth of the pocket abraded in the material is less relevant to the result.
Where used for milling, the abrasive fluid-jet has been confined to masked use because of difficulties related to depth and pattern control. Such milling is generally in accord with the teaching of U.S. Pat. No. 5,704,824 to Hashish, et al. The Hashish method and apparatus for milling objects includes holding and producing high-speed relative motion in three dimensions between a workpiece and an abrasive fluid-jet. Affixing the workpiece to a rapidly rotating turntable spinning past an abrasive fluid-jet that moves radially with respect to the turntable creates the high-speed relative motion.
The method relies on the use of a wear-resistant mask for facilitating milling and production. The masks selectively shield the workpiece from the efficient milling by the abrasive fluid-jet. Such milling, however, limits the resulting profile of pockets milled in the workpiece. Masks are also expensive to make and inherently limit the geometries that may be milled. The milling is generally only useful for producing pockets of uniform depth because of the generally constant relative speed and the generally constant operation pressure commonly used.
The most common masking procedure is to place the workpiece on a turntable and spin the workpiece in the presence of a relatively stationary vertically-oriented abrasive fluid-jet. The abrasive fluid-jet is moved radially to the turntable to translate the abrasive fluid-jet across the surface of the workpiece. Because of a shuttering effect as the fluid-jet transitions from the mask to the workplace and the constant speed of the jet relative to the workpiece, pocket edges tend to be rounded with an arcuate profile at an intersection between a sidewall and the floor of the pocket. Additionally, the abrasive fluid-jet tends, as well, to undercut the workpiece at the mask interface. While the degree of rounding and undercutting is dependent upon the pressure of the abrasive fluid-jet flow and the relative speed between the workpiece and the fluid-jet, the rounding and undercutting is pronounced enough to confine the use of abrasive fluid-jet milling to relatively low precision milling and it can be used to address only a limited range of workpiece designs.
What is needed is a method and apparatus to exploit the abrasive fluid-jet for precision milling without relying on a mask or high-speed relative motion.